Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. We review the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. Using case studies from longitudinal research we demonstrate that assets can afford useful insights into important change

Hydrologic classification of Tanzanian rivers to support national water resource policy

Classifying rivers into homogeneous categories based on hydrological and/or environmental attributes supports the implementation of environmental flows to sustain aquatic ecosystems and support the resource needs of society. Hydrological classifications provide decision-makers with a pragmatic number of water management units by grouping individual rivers or river segments expected to exhibit similar biophysical responses to flow alteration. Such classifications are particularly useful across broad geographies and in data-limited contexts, such as in Tanzania, where the legal requirement to implement environmental flows for all major waterbodies remains constrained by scant data. We present a two-level hydrological classification of all Tanzanian basins and the Rufiji River Basin. For the Rufiji River Basin, the largest river basin in the country, we performed an inductive classification based on the availability of long-term time series of daily average discharge. We clustered 28 gauging stations into seven classes according to ecologically relevant hydrological metrics and used boosted classification trees to predict the hydrological class of all 95,909 river segments in the basin based on environmental attributes that influence flow regimes. In the absence of consistent, readily-available gauged flow data, we conducted a deductive classification of all Tanzanian rivers whereby segments were directly grouped by multivariate similarity using the same environmental attributes. This analysis revealed 10 river classes reflecting the diversity of ecohydrological conditions characterizing the 486,681 river segments draining in and out of Tanzania. The new hydrological classifications presented here provide the foundation to guide implementation of management practices within the water policy framework of Tanzania

Promoting universal financial protection: a case study of new management of community health insurance in Tanzania.

BACKGROUND: The National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), a compulsory formal sector scheme took over the management of the Community Health Fund (CHF), a voluntary informal sector scheme, in 2009. This study assesses the origins of the reform, its effect on management and reporting structures, financial flow adequacy, reform communication and acceptability to key stakeholders, and initial progress towards universal coverage. METHODS: The study relied on national data sources and an in-depth collective case study of a rural and an urban district to assess awareness and acceptability of the reform, and fund availability and use relative to need in a sample of facilities. RESULTS: The reform was driven by a national desire to expand coverage and increase access to services. Despite initial delays, the CHF has been embedded within the NHIF organisational structure, bringing more intensive and qualified supervision closer to the district. National CHF membership has more than doubled. However, awareness of the reform was limited below the district level due to the reform's top-down nature. The reform was generally acceptable to key stakeholders, who expected that benefits between schemes would be harmonised.The reform was unable to institute changes to the CHF design or district management structures because it has so far been unable to change CHF legislation which also limits facility capacity to use CHF revenue. Further, revenue generated is currently insufficient to offset treatment and administration costs, and the reform did not improve the revenue to cost ratio. Administrative costs are also likely to have increased as a result of the reform. CONCLUSION: Informal sector schemes can benefit from merger with formal sector schemes through improved data systems, supervision, and management support. However, effects will be maximised if legal frameworks can be harmonised early on and a reduction in administrative costs is not guaranteed

Microwave-mediated synthesis of an arylboronate library

A series of arylboronates has been synthesized from the reaction of 2-(2-, (3-, or (4-(bromomethyl)phenyl)-4,4,5,5-tetramethyl-1,3,2-dioxaborolane 1{1-3) respectively with a range of N-, S-, and O-nucleophiles, using microwave-mediated chemistry. For the synthesis of N- and S-substituted boronates, a supported base, PS-NMM, was employed, and many reactions were complete within 15 min. With O-nucleophiles, a mixture of tetrabutylammonium bromide, potassium carbonate, and sodium hydroxide was employed. The resulting aminomethyl, mercaptomethyl, or alkoxy-/phenoxymethyl-arylboronates were subjected to microwave-mediated Suzuki Miyaura coupling reactions to afford a range of biaryls in moderate to good yields. The X-ray structures of five boronates were determined